What is the business we are in?

A session yesterday reviewing recent work with the global digital group at Edelman, chaired by the great Marshall Manson and by my personal hero Tim Callington. One of the issues that came up was the really important question: what business are we in, all of us measuring, understanding, deriving actions from social media?

Are we doing public relations?
Are we doing marketing?
Are we doing media planning?
Are we doing customer relationship management?
Are we researching new product opportunities?
Are we managing reputations?
Are we managing crises?
Are we an “agency”?
Are we consulting?

We are doing all of those things, but in a new way and with new tools. A lot of what occupies our thinking time in the office you might call “nerd marketing”. Looking at the data and then asking ourselves: “what the hell does that mean?” Have we asked the right question? Is this a solvable problem? If it is solvable, can our client solve it? Is it within their remit?

Because the answer to the question of what the data “means” often leads us to telling a brand manager that the market is saying they have the wrong product, or that the business has made a big mistake which must be undone.

That isn’t a problem a brand manager can solve. Only the C-suite can fix that.

So there is a strategic element to this.

At the same time we identify many individuals who have stories to tell about our brand, or abou the topic we are interested in. David Armano (who was at yesterday’s meet) calls these “micro-interactions”.

That isn’t a dialogue a brand manager, or a marketing campaign can take part in.

There is an element to this which is about a new kind of customer understanding, understanding networks of conversations, allowing relevant people who are not marketers or ad men to contribute to this network and helping unknown (and unknowable) others to find the message we think they should be hearing from us.

But this business lacks an identity. The recent deal between McKinsey and Nielsen points the way to how the various ingredients might coalesce at a strategic level. The integration of Salesforce and Radian 6 shows that folk are also addressing the other end of the scale, trying to weld a 2000-era CRM model onto these microinteractions.

But the whole thing – this nerd-driven, conversational, live, quanty, qually, networky, engagementy, light-footed, insight-derived decision-making tendency – lacks a name, a brand, a recognisable focus that can appear as a budget line. And while it lacks a name, it struggles to create awareness of its real value. As soon as the industry defines itself in simple terms, it will develop its full potential. And that potential is transformative. Before the decade is out businesses in this sector, using technologies like ours, attached to the right clients, will generate hundreds of billions a year in revenues.

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